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A Scanner Darkly Sneak-Peek
An anonymous reader writes "Some images for the upcoming film 'A Scanner Darkly' have been posted on aintitcool.com. Looks like it's going to look alot like one of Richard Linklater's previous films, Waking Life."
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Taaaaaaake oooooon meeeeeee
Take! On! Me!
Taaaaaake meeeeeee ooooooon!
Great! I'm gonna have song in my head all day now!
You can't take the sky from me...
I've got to say, I think this could really work. Being "non-realistic" in the first place adds scope for elegantly coping with the multiple (and extremely blurred) levels of reality in the book (which, btw, is my favourite from all the Dick I have read so far).
/me doesnt look foward to 2005 movie going.
I love this style. I'm really glad to see a few select individuals in Hollywood, that are trying to break away from the cliche of most Hollywood crap. Movies like A Scanner Darkly and Sin City are examples of this.
I gotta tell you, this more "realistic" style of cartooning is much more interesting than the anime style of Miyazaki. For one, the 3 dimensional depth aspect is added through the use of very well thought out shading, so the characters seem more alive than most other cartoons.
With the exception of Grave of the Fireflies (Hotaru no Haka), which succeeded because of the power of the story more than anything else, Miyazaki's work pales in comparison to the screenshots shown here.
Slashdot gone to the dogs now. I say, retreat to hurd-dev@gnu.org
Philip K. Dick is a rather famous sci-fi author responsible for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, upon which the film Bladerunner was based.
While the plots in some of his books don't really come together neatly in the end, he does quite well at creating vivid imagery, fascinating characters, and imagination-sparking ideas.
A Scanner Darkly and Do Androids Dream of Electrip Sheep? are two of his more famous, and some of his best, published works.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
I want to see a great movie, not a great special effect.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
But it's still not 'news for nerds' which is why I come to this site. What does this movie have to do with Linux and Open Source?
*shrug* It doesn't have to.
Most nerds like sci-fi... Most people don't complain when Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, and/or Arthur C. Clarke are mentioned in stories.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
At one time, appreciation of science fiction was a significant component of nerdliness. There's certainly enough Star Wars in-jokery here to illustrate that on a daily basis. Anyway, Philip K. Dick is widely considered to have been one of the greatest science fiction authors of all time, although since he died in 1982, many Slashdot readers may be too young to know that.
#!
There are plenty of other websites available which have movie reviews etc. This site is for Open Source and Linux. Let's try and keep it that way! The Internet has precious few resources for nerds as it is, without this hollywoodization of one of the last 'old school' nerd websites.
Either you lack imagination or you're just lazy. Not trolling btw, just stickin' up for Miyazaki and for unrealistic animation in general. I've never once understood why people would go to the movies to see reality, or why they'd complain when they don't. Then again, I'm a boy, and I watch my niece play pretend that she's a mom/teenager all day and I don't understand that.
Anyway, back on topic, what makes Miyazaki great is that it isn't real, it's better than real. When you're being real, you're limited by what's believable. When you don't bother with reality, you're only limited by consistency (i.e. stuff shouldn't come out of nowhere, and it doesn't in a Miyazaki film). It's easier, and more fun, to suspend disbelief when reality isn't smacking you in the face every couple of minutes....
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The sequel, planned for next year, is titled "And My Printer Fading"
I like the animation style, but animation seems to be a bit strong of a word. The technique, developed by a guy from MIT, strikes me as a cross between rotoscoping and key-frame animation. The actors are filmed and then painted over. So they have a complete reference for the shadows, etc. It's tracing, not true animation. I always pictured A Scanner Darkly the movie as looking very much like Cheech and Chong with bits of neat sci-fi tech. The book oozes its 70s setting with the cars and the guy's house and stuff. Also, the book starts off very funny, like C&C, and starts to tumble down from there. If I was filming it (thank god I'm not), Up in Smoke would have been my main visual inspiration!
I think there is something about the logical brains posessed by nerds that makes them realise what other less intelligent people cannot see, which is that although Capitalism is great for some, it is not the most efficient way to maximise the average person's happiness.
So as I have shown, left-wing and nerd are almost synonymous.
Of course you will get the odd right-wing loony, >coughcough, but on the whole, intelligence (in the computer science / nerd domain) seems highly correlated with left wing/compassionate political views.
I have never seen that style used in a video before. I'm assuming its drawn or do that use an ultra-special post-processor?
The movies are pretty much all under the "Movies" category. If you have a useraccount, you can simply choose to filter these out of the frontpage.
:)
You don't have to venture into any stories you don't want to read, either... that's the idea behind having the short little blurbs on the front page. If something doesn't interest you, just keep scrolling
I'm not trying to sound like a smart-aleck, but, I agree with the slashdot admins in that I think there should be a lot of different things here, not just science, math, and computer technology articles.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
When I first read the title, I thought it was for a next generation of scanners...single quotes (ie. a 'scanner darkly' sneak-peak) would've done the trick.
A new Phillip K. Dick movie is news for nerds.
In fact, I can't think of a single group of people who would be anymore interested in this news. If you read through the comments at the site, you'll see that the average AICN mainstream film whore is NOT interested in this film.
I hope they take a stab at Ubik next....
You could make a comparable specious argument that all nerds are sci-fi fans.
If you don't think this is news for you, then please move onto the next Arch discussion.
I am a huge fan of Philip K. Dick's work, and the thought of Hollywood getting its mitts on any of his major works again would normally fill me with trepidation.
But, oddly enough, I have a good feeling about this one, just as I also had a good feeling about Peter Jackson's LOTR trilogy. I thought Jackson et al worked very hard to capture a look and feel that would correspond with the private imagery of the majority of LOTR readers, and while they compromised a few major story elements, the critical and market response shows that they largely succeeded.
The key to A Scanner Darkly, which Dick renders with Dostoyevskian brilliance, is the onset of psychosis in its principal characters due to drug abuse and addiction. As Dick himself has pointed out, the dreamlike dialog throughout the book absolutely nails the eroding states of mind of these lost souls just as it happened to a lot of his own contemporaries in the sixties and seventies, and this dialog is in turn absolutely central to the book - so much of the narrative is taken up with these burnouts freaking each other out for no apparent reason, talking about nothing into the wee hours, etc. etc., just as they do in Waking Life. So my take on this movie is that may be one of the few times that Linklater's admittedly annoying animation technique and directorial style may actually be the most appropriate way to render Dick's vision onscreen. This could actually be pretty cool.
Now the cast, that's something else again. Woody Harrelson? Keanu Reeves? I dunno...
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This story using this technique, with Linklater at the helm is BOUND to be amazing. It sounds like peanut butter and chocolate to me....
To top it off, I thought I read that Steven Soderberg is producing this film. While his name is attached to a lot of crappy films, he also made Schizopolis which has to be one of the greatest films ever made (also dealing with issues of self and identity). If you haven't seen it, see it - you're only hurting yourself if you don't....
Writing "alot" makes you look "alittle" retarded, don't you think, timothy?
Yeah... but Winona Ryder... reason enough to go see this one for me. Who cares if she's a shoplifter? :)
Heh, in the book, her character was a shoplifter too.
#!
While the erosion of the mind is a main theme in A Scanner Darkly, it is not the only theme presented. In fact, the psychological split between addict and police officer is arguably more important to the book.
Dick has stated that in A Scanner Darkly, he wanted to investigate the mind of an undercover agent - one who works toward one set of goals in one persona, then works to undermine those goals as another persona. While Substance D (the drug in the book, for those who don't know) exacerbates the problem and creates two independent entities from one mind, it is arguable that anyone trying to work undercover must segregate their mind in the same fashion. While the theme of descent into madness is certainly a large part of A Scanner Darkly, as well as many of Dick's other works, it is not the only theme.
I would imagine that it would be extremely difficult to adapt the theme of a split personality to film. While the artists could certainly provide differing character traits to each half of the split personality, it seems that it would be difficult to maintain the cognitive dissonance presented towards the end of the book, in which the two halves seem like completely different characters. It would seem that some innovative cinematography would have to come into play here; it would take a truly talented team of artists to accomplish this. I can only hope that they're up to the task.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
During the talk, people asked when he was going to release the program. He basic answer was he didn't want to become involed in anything that would take him away from programming -- starting a business, licensing, etc. I asked him about releasing it open source, and he said something to the effect of "I know it works, I'm just not sure how".
In any case, I just checked on the studio's website, and it appears that the program will be released in June, 2006. You can put yourself on an email list to be notified of its release.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/scanner.pdf
I would have prefered to see this one.
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
The protagonist is a drug dealer and a narcotics agent. The IMDB summary implies this is only because he uses drugs that split his personality. The much more interesting truth, which shone through Dick's novel, is that people do switch sides all the time! Captured drug dealers really are offered immunity from punishment if they'll be DEA double-agents. And agents who realize the money to be made, and their privileged position, really do succumb to temptation and start dealing drugs. More generally, both cartels and the DEA work to preserve the current Drug War, rather than managed and taxed legalization as with alcohol since Prohibition. Hopefully the movie pushes this home, despite IMDB's summary.
Plus, he's played by Keanu Reeves. I mean, really.
On the plus side, if they left the EEG machine in the movie, this should spike interest in OpenEEG.
It would seem that some innovative cinematography would have to come into play here; it would take a truly talented team of artists to accomplish this.
No special innovation is needed, as PKD laid out the visual clues to the different personalities quite explicitly. The criminal persona looks like a normal person, while the "real" police officer is covered by an audio-visual distortion field.
This brings up an important aspect of the book that you didn't mention: for most of the story, the reader was unaware of exactly which druggie was actually the undercover cop. And, as things develop, the cop eventually forgets this himself...
Dick also wrote Minority Report, made into the recent movie Minority Report. His protagonists are usually cops. Brilliant insane technologists create new technologies like drugs and weapons, and the poor cops, like most people, are left to try and deal with it as best they can.
Blade Runner is the best movie I've ever seen, while Minority Report is just very good. Guess which one had flashier special effects?
I thought it was RMS as Communist that gave it away... can you really imagine him saluting at one of those big military parades?
Still, I'd rate this troll much better than average; it gives the old "Conservatives are stupid!" banality some real subtlety and bite.
Poindexter and ESR, an authoritarian and a libertarian respectively, would be excellent counter-examples.
So much of the book is consumed with dialogue between burnt-out or nearly burnt-out druggies, and they seem to have cast every indie-type star who's had a public bout with rehab. Winona Ryder as Donna? Woody Harrelson as Luckman? And you've gotta love Robert Downey, Jr. as Barris. If any
I also think that the rotoscoping should make for a really cool effect for Fred's "vague blur" suits.
(This is my favorite PKD novel-- and I did an undergraduate thesis on the guy, and so have read, at last count, 50 of the 52 extant novels. I'll probably be one of those losers who take the day off work and show up for the premiere....)
I enjoyed Waking Life, and I'm a certified Dick nut. A Scanner Darkly is one of the greatest pieces of "short" fiction of our century, and it's a shame that society regards Dick primarly as a scifi writer, when he was one of the most astute social commentators of our time. He just happened to be good at expressing his fears and thoughts through a captivating medium.
For the unitiated, A Scanner Darkly is at the front of the reality-bending/drug/psychological thriller genre. Before there was Thomas Harris or Hunter S. Thompson, there was Dick. God, I have shivers already.
...they both come together really well?
I would have walked out on it if I hadn't been on a date, who was running her fingers over my hand during the movie. When it was over, I asked her what she was doing. She told me she was spelling "I want to leave." I could have screamed. I think she did when I told her I hated it too.
I have every anime (by Miyazaki) that has been released in the US. While I can't stand My neighbor Tortoro, my kids love every one. I personally really like Princess Mononoke. I didn't know realism was important in a movie, I've seen enough hollywood slop that I can't believe anyone expects realism. I agree with you that his anime is fun and enjoyable.
Vertical
72 CD D7 52 D0 7E D8 47 44 91 D5 84 D1 59 F1 A9-This is my 128bit integer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
So if you spend your life attempting to get inside the head of a machine with roughly 1/(10^9) the power of the average human brain (in commands per time), that is physically incapable of doing other than it is told, then the left is for you!
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
I'm still waiting for 'man in the high castle' to be done as a movie.
not as sci-fi as other PKD, just alternate-future. Good story, tho. Could translate well into movie form, I think...
I would imagine that it would be extremely difficult to adapt the theme of a split personality to film.
How about "Fight Club"? Or "Me, Myself and Irene"? And those are just the first two that come to mind.... It's not as if split personalities are a new plot device where Hollywood is concerned, but it does require some uncommonly good acting and directing talent.
His protagonists are usually cops. Are you sure about that? I've read all of his novels, most of his short stories, and only recall a small percentage of his protagonists being law enforcement. Mostly I just recall his characters as being more along the lines of Joe Everyman or even people society would call just plain losers. Then again, aside from a recent reread of Valis, it's been a couple years since I've gone through any of his work again.
Everything will be taken away from you.
If I don't piss myself laughing during the bit when they're talking about putting gold in the trunk and 12 friends in the back seat of his car to stop it from fishtailing I'll be pissed (sic).
That was one of THE funniest things I've ever read book.
The second funniest thing I've ever read was when they're trying to figure out the gears on a 12 speed bike.
No, you find out that Fred is Arctor pretty much the moment he's introduced.
"If you look 'round the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Quiz Show
The rotoscoped screenshots' style is quite reminiscent of SVG images such as Lion (PNG) and Tiger (PNG). The strong, solid lines lend themselves to vector rendering. Perhaps the entire movie could be thus done in SVG?
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
The main thing to note here is that they will fuck up the movie. There is no way they can be honest to the spirit of the novel and get the movie distributed in the malls of America. Then again, the perversion of the novel will pay for a shopping trip to those malls for the heirs of PKD, who, I would assume, are happy to live in the world he predicted.
Anyways, my favorite part of the novel is this, where one of the characters has decided to commit suicide by overdose:
That, my friends, is some fine fucking literature.
Another favorite of mine is "Flow My Tears the Policeman Said", in which the protagonist is a uber-famous celebrity, a Somebody with a capital S, who wakes up in a flop house one morning to discover that he is quite literally a nobody. He has no identification papers and no one recognizes him.
One of the major characters is a Chief of Police.
One of the interesting things about Dick's work that might be considered hackery, yet transcends hackery, is his recycling of various elements. The reason it is transcendant is because the plots themselves are not the most important. The subtext is.
This is why Ridley Scott could thematically switch the roles of Decker and the androids. In DADoES, it is the androids that are void of empathy. In Bladerunner, it is Decker that is more inhuman and unfeeling than the androids. Yet Scott is able to render a film that is true to the spirit of PKD, that makes us question what it is to be human.
Heh, the sermon is now over. What do I know? I'm covered in aphids.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I hated Waking Life, too. But then the bong made it around to me, and a few minutes later, I realized why everyone liked it so much.
But then I tried to show it to someone else. There was no bong this time. I quickly apologized for ever suggesting the movie, and we both agreed to watch the Disney Channel because it's more mentally stimulating.
#5. Flat Black Films hasn't produced a movie with a plot. Waking Life was collection of random encounters; the making of which was really just a collaboration in many ways.
#4. All of the movies made from PKD's novels have been either a flop, or stripped key plot elements. If you read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and watched Blade Runner then you'll know what I'm talking about.
#3. The choice to use animation instead of live action means there's no reality to question. People don't question cartoons, they are merely entertained by them.
#2. When asked about Warner Independent (who co-financed A Scanner Darkly) the Dick Estate stated they were "... A new division of WB devoted to serious films with modest budgets." Why not give it the BIG BUDGET that a film like this should have? Are studios not willing to take the risk?
#1. Keanu Reeves -- need I say more?
There's a Ubik screenplay that PKD wrote. I don't think it's as good as the book, but it's better than you might think.
Now is the time - now that you have been warned. It'll be a miracle if this doesn't rubbish the book in some respect so just do yourself a favour and read A Scanner Darkly before it gets Keanu'd and you can never think of it without, uh, like, you know, dude.
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I don't smoke, but I had a lot of stoner friends at the time. I felt that watching that movie was like listening to them philosophize. They all think it's interesting and "deep" under the influence, and all the sober people are bored out of their mind. Plus they would do this for free, and I had to pay $7 or something at the movie theater!
The worst part is that I am from Austin, where Linklater lives and filmed the movie. So everyone thought the movie was cool because they knew someone in it (I knew at least two people in the movie, which did not increase my enjoyment of it in the least). Don't even get me started on the neverending hagiography of local moviemakers by the alternative weekly paper, either. They gave it 3.5 stars, which is almost their minimum for a local film (they gave that many to Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams).
I should really end this rant and go do something.
#5 Irrelevant.
#4 I argue elsewhere that Ridley Scott stayed true to PKD*, despite, or even because of the way he transposed the emotional meaning of Decker/the androids. Pretty much all the others I've seen I'd agree with you. *(I'm refering to the director's cut. The studio version was an abortion.)
Furthermore, stripping elements is pretty much a given when adapting any novel to the screen. The key to a good adaptation seems to be knowing which elements are essential and which aren't. So, yes, there are huge amounts of material missing from Bladerunner, and I'm sure we all have our favorite bits that were left out (I especially missed the Penfield Mood Organ), but that's pretty much the way it goes, unless you're talking Elmore Leonard.
Anyway, by this criteria, all adaptions must fail it.
#3. This is a failing of your imagination, not mine.
#2. A big budget movie will suffer from exactly the problems that Paycheck, Total Recall, Minority Report, etc., etc. suffer from. A big budget scanner darkly will be burdened by flashy special effects and the twisted story itself will be jettisoned in favor of some formulaic doppelganger abortion because with so much money on the line, the studio will be nervous. In the big budget version, Bob Arctor kicks his substance D addiction by the end of second act, kills the Islamic terrorist drug manufacturers that killed his best friend Jerry with invisible bio-engineered aphids in the first act and finally marries Donna, and they all live happily ever after. The only chance this project stands of succeeding on our terms is if it's a low budget prestige project that stays mostly under the radar of the execs, lawyers, and bean counters.
#1. You've got me there. I'm pretty worried about this aspect. I can think of a hundred name actors they might have gotten. Why not Ed Norton? Why Keanu? As far as I am concerned, the three actors that would stand the best chance of totally wrecking this movie are Keanu, Matt Damon, and Ben Afleck. Shit! I think I'd rather see Jean Claude Van Damme in the role.
Still, the rest of the cast sounds incredibly impressive, so I still hope for the best.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Linus is from Finland. But the facts of socialism are equally true.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Maybe they could do a film, within a film sort fo thing.
Ciao
It's 'A Scanner Darkly', not a 'Scanner Darkly'.
4: Interresting? That's it! The moderation system is broken.
I gotta tell you, this more "realistic" style of cartooning is much more interesting than the anime style of Miyazaki. For one, the 3 dimensional depth aspect is added through the use of very well thought out shading, so the characters seem more alive than most other cartoons.
Miyazaki's work pales in comparison to the screenshots shown here.
It's ROTOSCOPY! Those "drawings" are traced over filmed images. And from the looks of it, it's vector based, making it very easy to automate the in-betweening.
Why would you even bring up Miyazaki? Why not bring up Disney's Snow White? That also used a lot of rotoscopy for Snow White herself, but blended in with traditional animation.
You can't take the sky from me...
GAH!!! NO! no, no NO!
No! When a story you are interrested in is coming up soon on the big screen and you have not yet read the book, do NOT read it now. The book is always better than the movie. So the only logical thing to do is to watch the movie first, enjoy it, and THEN read the book and enjoy it MORE.
That way you get
- Movie, good.
- Book: Better!
. If you do it the other way, you getWhy would you willingly subject yourself to not liking the movie? The book will still be there, as good as ever, after you've had a chance to enjoy the movie. If you rush out and read the book before, you ruin your chances of liking the movie.
My way makes you happy twice, your way makes you happy once, sad/mad once. Think about it, isn't the world bad enough as it is? Don't make it harder for yourself.
You can't take the sky from me...
In my opinion, it's really important to read the book first. That way, you create your own interpretation of the characters, settings, etc. Once you've seen the movie, regardless of how good or bad it is, there's no way to completely forget the actors' faces and voices, and your imagination is no longer completely your own. So I prefer to read a book with just me and the words, and not think things like, "Oh, this is the scene where Julia Roberts gets mauled by that badger".
left-wing and nerd are almost synonymous
Probably true, at least until some of those nerds actually start running (rather than working for, and complaining about) a company of any consequence.
Capitalism is great for some, it is not the most efficient way to maximise the average person's happiness
Shall we compare the average happiness in, say, the U.S., to the average (Vodka-soaked, line-standing, dead-by-50) happiness in the Soviet Union during the peak of their most glorious communistness? Or Cuba! Now there's a paradise of personal happiness! Especially since, if you're not happy, and say so, you get killed, thus increasing the rate of happiness among the survivors.
No, I think that most nerds remain highly sheltered from the workings of large groups of people, of ventures that actually produce the quality of life on the scale we have it in western hemisphere. Countries like Finland, or Sweden, are still basically capitalist countries, but with a very highly taxed population that gets a lot of it right back from the government in the form of services they can no longer personally afford to buy (because of the taxes). But the actual wealth in those countries is produced through good old fashioned capitalism: risk, innovation, reward.
The insular in-the-basement (or in-the-server-room) life of the nerd can make this stuff not so obvious. Further, the generally higher native intelligence among the nerd set means that they have a hard time imagining people that would rather just be thugs or parasites, and thus cannot imagine why people wouldn't all just work in a some idyllic global-village-like cooperative way. But the truth is that most people are not as inventive or dilligent as most nerds, and would much rather that the nerds of the world produced things for the rest of the world. In practice, that's pretty much how it works anyway, but at least most quality nerds can still make a real living even as much of their productivity is skimmed off the top for others' use.
It's the same cloistering effect of colleges. As soon as those folks get out of there and face the need to compete, to produce something materially useful - it's a shock in practice, and a shock philosophically. But, nerds are secretly smart enough to see that coming, and remain in Sci-Fi watching, slashdot yammering, Half-Life playing mode as a self defense mechanism. And, because the larger economy (partly fueled by the work those nerds' managers have them doing!) is so productive, we all have a decent standard of living regardless. The nerds that embrace both their nerdness and capitalism become very successful, and are then hated here on slashdot for leaving the nerd ghetto.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.